Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Honey, I'm home!

I finished Happier at Home, and as predicted it's giving me all sorts of New Life Plan ideas!

(By the way, M.H. is all too aware of this, and he also knows there's a chapter in the book about marriage. So now whenever I do anything nice for him, he asks suspiciously, "Are you Happiness Project-ing me?" Sheesh. I mean, not yet.)

Anyway, I realized that a source of anxiety for me is the fact that my job is almost never "done." (And of course when it is "done," freelancer panic starts to set in.) Instead of having a quitting time where I leave work behind and forget all about it, I bounce back and forth between working and not working all morning and afternoon and then sit at my desk late into the evening until I can't stand it anymore. And although I do take a fair amount of time off, I never feel like it's a good time to do it, because there's always more work waiting. It's as if I live at the office and just duck out occasionally to run personal errands. It know would be smart to set some office hours, but the problem is that my work volume ebbs and flows a lot and has pretty varied deadlines and timing.

But today I realized that while I would probably never be able to set office hours, I could try to keep some "home hours," when, barring a crisis, I am always off duty. I decided that from 2:30 to 4:30 every afternoon, I will be officially Home from Work. Today I used the time to go for a run, take a shower, cook dinner, sing until my kids begged me to stop, eat with the family, and help clean the kitchen. And you know, it's exactly the same kind of stuff I usually do anyway at that time of day, but it was strangely relaxing just to change my mind-set about it.